Shape+your+Life


 * || Shape your Life Jenni Spaulding-Topmiller Alexandra Allen || [[image:images-1.jpg]] ||

Overview
The idea of the game is to have kids learn about healthy foods and activities that will make them feel good about themselves and live a longer, healthier life. The game will take the players through two days of their life where they will make choices of what to eat and what activities they will participate in. These choices will have a direct effect on their physical appearance, grades in school, energy level, and life expectancy. The idea is for the player to see what they are choosing to eat and how these choices effect their lives. At the beginning, the player will choose a character that matches their own physical appearance, and it will also tell them the recommended daily calorie intake for their age group. The player will have to meet this calorie goal at the end of the day in order to get a small reward time. Then, their day will start with breakfast and end with a night time snack.

Players will be presented with a variety of food choices, some healthy and some not. As the player consumes food they will be alerted to whether their choice had a positive or negative impact on them. For example, if a player chooses a donut for breakfast they will be informed of the nutritional value of a donut and what to expect from consuming so much sugar and so many carbohydrates so early in the day. They will also find that their character has gained weight and is moving a little slower. Depending on the choices players make throughout the day, their weight will fluctuate as will their energy level. The character will have an energy meter as well as a scale at the bottom of the screen telling the immediate weight, calorie, and energy impact their food/exercise choices have made. These changes will directly effect the players ability to make it through the day. A player who has been making unhealthy choices will not have enough energy in their bank and may find themselves having difficulty concentrating in class. Also, they may not have the energy to participate in physical activities with friends after school. At the end of the day the player will be told their total calorie intake after food/exercise choices. If they have met the goal they will be awarded with a trip to the moon where there is a 5 minutes free game exploring outer space.

Instructional Objective
The objective of the game is to teach young children that if they eat healthy and exercise they will feel better and live longer as well as have a good body image. It is about teaching kids the right way to eat and creating habits that will last through their life. This game fits nicely into the National Health Education Standards for grades K-2: 1.2.1. Identify that healthy behaviors affect personal health. As well as the following standards: 
 *  **[|NPH-H.K-4.6] SETTING GOALS FOR GOOD HEALTH -**  ||  **[|NPH-H.K-4.3] REDUCING HEALTH RISKS**  ||

Learners
The game is designed for elementary and middle school students. Optimally, it will be for younger children grades K-5, assuring they get the information at a young age. The children will have had lessons on the food pyramid as well as a health or physical education course so they are coming into the game with background experience with health and well-being.

Context of Use
Students will be able to play this game in a school setting. This game is not set up to be used for group play, it is designed to accommodate one player. The game is designed for a single player. The game is developed for the Internet-savvy, requirements will be a Flash Player, it will have a dual platform, working on Macintosh or PC computers. In order for it to work at school the instructor would have to take their class to a computer lab where all students could play simultaneously. It could also be used in the classroom as a learning center. Students may play this game more than once, as the outcome depends on their choices throughout the game (i.e., different choices will lead to various outcomes). A single playing of the game will take approximately a half hour or less.
 * School**

The teacher could also show the game on a projector to students as a preview and have them play it at home, documenting their experiences or coming to school for a debriefing session.
 * Home**

Scope
This game will take about 20-30 minutes to play, since younger children do not have long attention spans it would be beneficial to keep the game short. The food pyramid content will be specifically included in the game, as well as information on goal setting for a healthy lifestyle. The calories that are burned through exercise and the good foods the players need to eat in order to have enough energy to participate in activities. How big will this game be? About how much time will it take to play? What content is specifically included? Excluded? For an adventure game, tell how many "rooms" and objects there will be. For a quiz game, how many questions and categories. For a branching story, how many screens and how many main branches.

Object of the Game
The goal of the game is to provide a direct visual correlation of what bad/good diet and exercise choices will do to their life. Letting children know that their bodies need calories for energy. If they do not participate in activities to burn this energy it will lead to weight gain. This game will showcase a simulation in which they are able to observe the direct effect diet and exercise choices have on their life. Exaggerated changes, negative and positive will be made to their physical appearance, energy level, social life. Changes are exaggerated in order to have a greater influence on the players, if the players are not active and have poor eating habits they will immediately show weight gain. In contrast, if players are active and eat healthy they will show increased muscle tone and a more fit, healthy image. The goal is that the students will realize the direct effects of diet and exercise and the aim is that this will shape their future lifestyle choices. Unfortunately, in some cases children do not have a choice in what they eat based on parental influences and or socioeconomic status. Therefore, ideally there would be another version of our game, Shape Your Life 2.0, aimed at an adult audience for the parents of our children.

[|Healthy Eating and Exercise NoteNiks]
[|My Pyramid Blast off Game]

There are several games already on the market that mirror the content covered in this game. The "My Pyramid Blast Off Game" from the My Food Pyramid.gov site is closest in comparison based on content age level, level of difficulty, and design. In this game players "fuel up" on healthy food choices and select exercises that will give them an optimal amount of energy. They then "blast off" to the moon, the distance they travel depends on the amount of fuel (i.e., healthy food choices consumed). The difference between this game and "Shape Your Life", aside from the obvious theme difference,is the integration of the food pyramid. "My Pyramid Blast Off" records the number of food items consumed from each food group and alerts the player when she has filled up on a certain food group.

Design Details
Universal Elements- below is a map of the game and the various stages each player will go through:



The "Shape Your Life" game is designed for young children, keeping this in mind the look of the game is cartoonish. The characters and scenes are colorful yet simple. The design is clean and unmistakeably meant for young children. The exaggerated appearance of the characters as they lose and gain weight throughout the game is intended to make a visual impact on young children. The items found throughout the game, such as bicycles and jump ropes are items common and recognizable to most children.

**Characters:**
This image shows the male and female characters as healthy individuals and as heavier version of themselves. The characters were created using Microsoft Paint in a cartoon style. These are just two of the potential characters. Ideally, there will be characters custom built based on the the player input. Ideally the characters would have features similar to the player in order to have a closer to real life experience. In the game, the characters will be viewed with full bodies to facilitate walking through the scenes and performing the exercises and activities available to them.



Setting:
The game will take place in several locations. One important location is the school cafeteria where students will choose from a variety of options to create a healthy lunch. Below is a rough sketch of the school cafeteria and a sketch of a physical activity scene: In the physical activity scene there is an example of the energy meter that will be used throughout the game and the calorie count.



//Technical Elements// When researching various types of technology needed to create a game such as this one  was an appropriate choice. This particular platform is part of a research project intended to connect educational content and games/game-like simulations. The  platform is compatible with Linux and Microsoft which makes it an excellent choice for an educational game as Microsoft is common at most school sites. While  is the platform of choice, the images for this wiki were created using Microsoft Paint,as the trial version of  did not allow for the creation of new characters, instead it provides users with generic characters which were inappropriate for this assignment. While Adobe Photoshop was considered as a plausible tool for creating the images in this game, Paint turned out to be easier to use for creating the style of character and background that would appeal to the target audience. Inspiration and Kidspiration were also used to design the map of the game as well as some of the scenes that will be present in the game.

Motivational Issues
We designed the game using Keller's ARCS model. The player initially needs their attention grabbed, to engage the player they are able to pick out a player that looks similar to them, this will motivate them to play, it will be more real to them than playing with a generic 'boy' or 'girl' character. Their attention will be grabbed with the calorie goal they are given at the beginning of the game. This gives them something to acheive. We wanted to make the game relevant to the students will be eager to play this simulation because it is similar to their daily lives. We want to incorporate scenes such as school, home, playground to make it as relevant to their lives as possible. Confidence will be able to be gained throughout the game with the exaggerated muscle and energy growth, the opportunity to shrink to a healthy size and to participate in sports and other forms of exercise, though virtual, is a great hook. However, if they consume unhealthy choices throughout the day they will loose confidence in their growing body and lack of energy. The satisfaction will come throughout the game and especially at the end if they have done well. Most players will have the intrinsic motivation to do well and make the cartoon version of themselves be the best it can be.

Design Process
The game idea came about fairly easily, I have always been interested in eating healthy foods and exercise and the importance of teaching this concept to my young students. Alex was also interested in this game as she teaches a unit on nutrition in her kindergarten classroom. Our first thoughts were to create a game for our students to play where they would make food choices throughout the day. We tried to use the e-adventures platform to design our game interface, however after several hours and e-mails I was unsuccessful getting it to work on my Mac. Alex tried e-adventures on her PC, but found the characters too mature and inappropriate for our elementary game idea. We both have background information about nutrition and the food pyramid concept from teaching elementary school and also from being in school ourselves. For further information to design and add content to our game we used literature from our class lectures and reading, as well as nutritional websites aimed at children. Being familiar with this unit at our schools, we wanted to make a game that would compliment the information we were teaching, using the game as an end of the unit activity. Wanting to make the game fun and knowing the attention spans of our children were not very long it was decided that the characters should show immediate effects good or bad directly after eating/exercising. These immediate exaggerated effects would help them better understand the importance of food/exercise on their lives. Bernie helped us brainstorm ideas about making the characters gain a lot of weight immediatly after a bad choice and build muscles right after good choices and exercises. I was not sure this was politically correct at first, but it is supposed to be a fun game that will draw children's attention and this will be fun for them. We did find similar games and took ideas for our game from both of the games to make our idea better. To get feedback on the idea, I had the students play the online Pyramid Blastoff game and give me feedback on the experience. They all really enjoyed the journey to space as a reward, so I decided to add it in to our game. The lessons I learned was that not all game resources work for everyone. It is best to start out very simple when you are hashing out ideas and then build on the things that work.